Remote Agents: Managing a Work from Home (WFH) Contact Center

Tips that are vital to the success of your WFH agent workforce

It was once very easy to ignore a business continuity plan during periods of fortune and economic prosperity. However, throughout the behavioral shifts resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses are seeing the consequences of their inactivity. They are unprepared for the changing realities of the workplace, and unable to swiftly satisfy consumers.

It’s time for companies to rethink their approach to make remote work operations, not only to support work-from-home in the near term, but to ensure that their Customer Experience (CX) remains strong. The following areas that are vital to the success of your work-from-home agent workforce:

KPI ALIGNMENT – Remote agents are no longer viewing a common wall score board in the contact center or meeting in groups to review performance. Work-from-home agents can, however, remain aligned with the key CX KPI’s by making sure they know how their metrics platforms objectively score specific performance attributes. Once that objectivity is understood, it’s a necessity to ensure agents have access to their own performance metrics.

ENGAGEMENT – Arguably the greatest challenge across any industry’s work force management during remote working and minimal face-to-face interaction. Enabling agents to compare their performance scores against other team members or with other teams can exponentially increase remote agent engagement.

RECOGNITION – Instances where CX has a positive impact on events are frequently recognized by the emotions and enthusiasm expressed by a caller. This valuable feedback should be used to individually as well as “publicly” recognize the agent, within their peer group. And it doesn’t have to stop there. Sharing snippets of positive unsolicited feedback with leadership beyond the contact center doubles down on the positive recognition benefit for the agent. This is even more important when agents may be working in isolation without the benefit of social interaction or camaraderie.

GAMIFICATION – Competition among agents improves focus. Friendly rivalry is just as effective when applied within a remote situation as it is when it’s within the walls of a contact center. Meet as a team using a conference application to build camaraderie. No one’s safe from the behavioral economic consequences brought upon by the coronavirus. But adapting to remote working capabilities will give your contact center and organization the best chance at being on the favorable side of financial Darwinism.

By Allen Shapiro | April 27th, 2020 | CallMiner